Barry Long : The End of the World
A Prayer for Life: The End of the World by Barry Long Narrated by Barry Long Unabridged — 1 hours, 19 minutes Barry
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Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle
Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle
What’s the connection between Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle? Many people have asked the question. The following article was written by a man who attended many of Barry’s meetings around the world over a period of some sixteen years up until 2002 when Barry stopped teaching publicly. The views expressed are the writer’s own.
THE CONTROVERSY
For many years, there has been online discussion concerning the links between Barry Long and the renowned spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle. Some have speculated about the extent to which Tolle’s teaching may have been influenced by Barry Long’s books published in the 1980s, many years before Tolle’s seminal work, The Power of Now.
What follows is an attempt to set the record straight and hopefully to clear up some of the misunderstandings that have arisen over time regarding the relationship between Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle and the influence which Barry Long’s work had on the development of Tolle’s teaching.
‘ECKHART’S AUSSIE MATE’
Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Aussie Mate’ was how Australian TV Channel Seven described Sydney-born Barry Long, when Tolle appeared on the channel’s news magazine show in March 2009 to promote his speaking tour that year in Australia. The clip of the show can be found on YouTube.
Tolle had been invited into the TV studio as someone who enjoyed celebrity status. Widely acclaimed as the world’s best-known contemporary spiritual teacher, he had racked up huge sales with the phenomenal success of The Power of Now, first published in 1997, having been championed for years by the U.S. chat show icon Oprah Winfrey.
So, what is the connection between Eckhart Tolle and Barry Long? Why did Tolle say in that Australian TV programme that he loved Long’s teaching and regarded him as ‘a powerful teacher’? And has Barry Long had a deeper, more formative influence on the German spiritual teacher than has been commonly recognised? Many of Barry Long’s audience have said so. In fact, it has been claimed by some that The Power of Now bears more than a passing similarity to one of Long’s books and, indeed, that certain passages amount to a form of plagiarism.
As far as I’m aware, before being interviewed on Channel Seven, Tolle’s public acknowledgement of his early links with Barry Long had been few and far between. In an interview published in John W. Parker’s book, Dialogues with Emerging Spiritual Teachers (2009), he had mentioned some teachers who had helped him understand his own state in the early days of his spiritual development. After referring to the initial formative influence of a Western-born Buddhist monk by the name of Achan Sumedo, he made the following somewhat cursory reference to Barry Long: ‘And in London I spent some time with Barry Long. I also understood things more deeply, simply through listening and having some conversations with him.’ Continuing, he referred to ‘other teachers who were just as meaningful whom I never met in person’, citing Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi: ‘And I feel actually that the work I do is a coming together of the teaching 'stream', if you want to call it that, of Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi’.
The impression of a relatively slight connection with Barry Long has also been reflected in Tolle’s response to occasional enquiries about the subject from the audience at his seminars. Responding to one questioner he says Barry Long ‘lived in London when I was also living in London at a time when I was still trying to find some answers to my inner transformation.’ After mentioning having visited Buddhist monasteries where he says he ‘got some answers’, he comments, ‘and then I discovered Barry Long and talked to him a few times and went to some of his talks in Highgate, London.’ And while he refers to, or quotes from, a number of spiritual teachers or sages in The Power of Now, (for example, Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Marcus Aurelius) Barry Long receives no mention. So what was the connection between the two men? When did it begin? And was Barry Long’s influence on Tolle significant or not?
THE STORY BEGINS IN 1984
Some years after Tolle’s breakthrough realisation, which he describes graphically in the introduction to The Power of Now, a quiet, earnest and softly-spoken man first appeared at Barry Long’s weekly meetings in London. Leonard Tolle (as he was then known) sat in the audience of forty to fifty people to hear the powerful, impassioned words that the Australian delivered in weekly talks at The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, a distinguished Victorian building on a hill in north London, overlooking Hampstead Heath and the sprawling metropolis below.
Barry Long’s inspirational talks were fired by the realisations he’d had in India after leaving behind job, home, wife and family in his native land. He was determined to find the truth and to live it, come what may. Now he was talking truth to anyone who would listen. He ranged over a vast canvas of subjects, but the main themes in the Highgate talks were stillness, what ‘now’ is, and how individuals can rid themselves of unhappiness – be free of ‘the unhappy body’ inside each one of us.
Leonard Tolle was a regular attendee at these talks and occasional weekend meetings in the period 1984-85. The series of meetings came to an end in February 1986. I first saw Barry Long speak in the following year and was not present at any of those events, but I have spoken to somebody who was, who knew Tolle personally, and who worked for The Barry Long Centre. He recalls that Tolle appeared a somewhat quiet, reserved man who made no special reference to his own spiritual realisation. Some accounts suggest that he was destitute in London, but by the time he was attending these meetings, he was living in a flat in Primrose Hill, a well-to-do area of the city, and was trying to set himself up as an art dealer.
On the question of whether Eckhart Tolle ever spoke to Barry Long, who invited questions at every meeting he held, apparently it is not known or recorded that Tolle asked any questions in public or that they spoke privately together. However, the latter is certainly possible, because sometimes Barry Long did draw someone aside at the end of a meeting, to speak to for a few minutes.
There is no doubt that during this period of regularly attending Barry Long’s meetings, Tolle absorbed Long’s teaching and heard the truth of it. Indeed his enthusiasm for the Australian’s teaching prompted him to volunteer to help The Barry Long Centre. One thing mentioned was an offer to translate into his native German one of Long’s early books (Knowing Yourself).
It is not clear whether Tolle continued to attend any of Barry Long’s meetings after those held at Highgate came to an end in 1986, or indeed the extent to which he may have continued to absorb Long’s teaching. However, in his response to the questioner at the seminar referred to above, Tolle was clearly aware of Barry Long’s audio tape, How to Stop Thinking, which was published in 1987. Referring to it in light-hearted mode, he says, ‘I didn’t need that tape anymore because I had already stopped [thinking]’.
It’s possible, though, that Tolle had at some point listened to the tape, since there are a number of similarities in the way he addresses stopping thinking in The Power of Now. For example, Barry Long’s tape starts with him making the unusual observation that ‘Thinking is a psychological disease . . .’ whilst its concluding statement begins, ‘Your intelligence has got to be there watching the emotion like your cat watching a mouse hole. That way, the mouse - the thought - can’t come out’.
In The Power of Now, Tolle also refers to thinking as ‘a disease’ (p.13) and deploys the same illustrative device as in Long’s tape published ten years earlier: ‘. . . become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole?’ (p.77)
It would, of course, be easy to dismiss as simple coincidence these similarities in addressing the subject of stopping thinking if it were not for many other such similarities on different topics, which those familiar with Barry Long’s teaching could hardly fail to notice upon reading The Power of Now. One subject - emotional unhappiness – serves to illustrate this, as we’ll come to later on.
INFLUENCE AND SIMILARITIES
By the way of things, every spiritual teacher is influenced by the total environment in which they are born and raised. And at certain points in their spiritual process they almost invariably come within the immediate orbit of, or absorb the influence of, one or more spiritual teachers whose knowledge at that time is greater than theirs. This serves to mould, sometimes decisively, their own particular vision before they themselves emerge into the public arena to start teaching in their own right.
Over the years on the internet many references have built up to perceived similarities between the teachings of Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle. Some observers have identified general areas of overlap or consensus between the two. Others have been quite blunt, accusing Tolle – writing a decade or so after Long’s books were first published – of appropriating and popularising some of Long’s key teachings. However, the fact is that the similarities between many elements of Long’s and Tolle’s writings are likely to be obvious to even a casual observer.
Comparing The Power of Now (1997) and parts of Tolle’s acclaimed follow-up book, A New Earth (2005) with Long’s output from the 1980s, one is struck again and again by similarities in the overarching themes, individual subjects and their presentation. In particular, the following key themes from The Power of Now reflect the landscape explored and charted a decade or so earlier in Long’s teachings:
• The nature and cause of emotional pain and how to deal with it;
• Entering the body in meditation – focusing on feeling the inner sensation of the body, using the conscious attention;
• Detaching from the mind – observing the arising and operation of thought; stilling the chattering mind;
• The state of presence – being present in the moment, now, and experiencing the joy of being.
Barry Long’s most powerful and far-reaching book, The Origins of Man and the Universe (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1984) can be seen as a study of the power represented by the word ‘now’, and of what that power has produced right from the Big Bang and throughout the evolution of consciousness. It is not plausible to discount the influence that this book and its revelations would have had on Tolle.
The following short extracts illustrate the centrality of ‘now’ to the grand canvas painted in the ‘Origins’ book:
‘I have just described eternity as an energetic representation of all that has ever happened or can happen in actuality. That means it is perceivable, but how? It is perceived as the now. The moment of truth, the moment of eternity, is now.’ (p.198)
‘Now is the one and only perpetual instant from which the world continuously - or rather discontinuously - begins afresh every moment by having no past.’ (p.198)
‘Now and the universe are cosmically identical: the universe is now, and now is the universe. The one self-evident quality of now is that it never changes; it is always original, always the beginning of everything.’ (p.224)
NOW, THE TRUTH
‘The way of the spirit is really no way at all, because it is always now. The spirit is now. Life is now. Now is timeless. The truth of the spirit eliminates all time. Surrender all your yesterdays, every attachment to the whole lot, NOW, not tomorrow, not gradually.’
Barry Long wrote those words in a pamphlet that was freely distributed in 1987 and illustrates the emphasis on now, and on living now, throughout Barry Long’s teachings.
The Origins of Man and the Universe, with its focus on now and the beginning of time, had been published in 1984 when Eckhart Tolle was attending the meetings in Highgate, and the subject of ‘now’ continued to be addressed. After Barry moved back to his homeland in 1986 he recorded monthly half-hour talks from his new home on Mount Tamborine in Queensland. Here are three extracts from those talks, to illustrate the continuing importance of the theme:
‘The most difficult thing for anyone endeavouring to find God or the truth now, is to eliminate the mind's almost essential reference to the past and the future as some sort of reflection of 'the now'. Your job is to be able to see it all NOW.’ (From Tamborine Talk, December 1987)
‘Do you look forward to things?
Then you're out of your body.
All you've really got is your body. You don't look forward to having a body, do you?
Do you have to look forward to love? Or can you feel your love now?
Do you have to look forward to life? Or can you feel your life now?
Life is now.
Looking forward is a drug, an addiction.
Be where you are now - in your body.’
(From Tamborine Talk, January 1988)
‘The truth is now. The truth is that life is right now. Please look at it: Life is right here now. If you're going to project yourself backwards or forwards by any analytical thought, you're going to enter time. Any judgment of what I am saying (instead of listening, receiving) is going to make time.
‘What is the truth of life now? It is now, without any intellectual activity whatever. Does that make any difference to your existence? No, it doesn't. But now you are with your existence; now you have eliminated the distance between your existence and yourself. You have brought them together. There is now no time. But there is action, the passage of events. And action is timeless. If you look around you see movement of the wind, the trees; you see the people come into the room, or the movement of your own hands; you hear your own voice or the voices of others. That is all movement, all action - all timeless. It never ceases.’ (From Tamborine Talk, August 1988)
THE UNHAPPY/PAIN-BODY
It is in Barry Long’s book, Only Fear Dies that the most obvious comparisons with Tolle’s output many years later are to be found. This book was written and published in shorter form (as Ridding Yourself of Unhappiness) in 1984, the same year as The Origins of Man and the Universe. The following extracts in relation to just one subject – the nature of emotional unhappiness – from Barry Long’s book are followed in each case by an italicised extract from The Power of Now.
‘Each hurt, which in your ignorance you thought was over, that you'd got over, every disappointment and heartbreak joins your residual emotional body.’ (Long, p.36)
Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. (Tolle, p.29)
‘You may think you get pleasure out of your emotions. But it's a fickle pleasure, an emotional high that never lasts because its opposite pole is a fickle pain, an emotional low.’ (p.30)
And every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time. (p.26)
‘Any unhappiness you remember and grieve over is already past and resident in you, so that is not the unhappiness that begins now.’ (p.37)
There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. (p.26)
‘When you, your natural being, are buoyant, the emotional body is dormant. When the emotional body is buoyant, you are dormant.’ (p.32)
...the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.
When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it. (p.30)
‘The emotional body is a living thing, living off you like a parasite, and it does not want to die (p.45) . . . the emotional body is as alive and intelligent as you are. It does not want to be found out and seen as separate from you. So it will try to distract you, and it usually succeeds. One way it does this is by affecting other parts of the body with aches and pains. These are not lasting . . . You must understand that due to your neglect and ignorance, the unhappy emotional body has taken charge of much of your inner self, your subconscious. It will not surrender. You have to get in there and root it out, consciously, energetically.’ (p.42-3)
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, ‘become you’, and live through you. It needs to gets its ‘food’ through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form . . . (p.30)
The pain-body ... is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don’t face it . . . you will be forced to relive it again and again. (p.31)
Incidentally, other comparisons are made by the author Jack Dawes on his website, Creation of Now. In his article, The Hidden History of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Pain-Body’, the influence that Barry Long and Fourth Way teacher, Maurice Nicoll had on Tolle in relation to the idea of an 'emotional pain body' is explored at length.
WHAT REALLY MATTERS?
Every spiritual teacher naturally attracts to them those potentially able to appreciate and absorb their particular level of self-knowledge. While for some aspirants the words of the teacher, or spiritual master, might make little or no sense, for others they seem like the proverbial manna from heaven. In the vaster scheme of things, the originality of a particular teaching – or ‘who influenced who’ – is of no real significance. What really matters is that a greater knowledge is able to be imparted to individuals as a contribution to the continuing enlightenment of the global human psyche. Not all teachers choose to acknowledge the extent to which they are indebted to another in contributing to their own vision, and certainly Barry Long wasn’t a man to be bothered by such matters.
A few years before his death in 2003, I was at one of the fortnight-long ‘Master Sessions’ held annually in the coastal Bush of Northern New South Wales, when Barry Long was presented with a copy of The Power of Now. He appeared at the start of one session with a copy of the book in hand. Seating himself in front of his 300-strong audience, he glanced through the pages for a short while, seemingly bemused by the book’s contents, before remarking, ‘Well, I thought I’d picked up one of my old books!’ On another occasion he was asked if he could remember anything about meeting Tolle. The answer was no.
He’d spoken years before on an audio tape about the ‘clones of Barry Long’: teachers who were quite obviously adopting or appropriating significant parts of his teaching to present as their own. At the time, he’d seemed resigned to the fact – and years later, leafing through The Power of Now in the flickering sunlight at the Australian seminar, he appeared equally nonplussed. For Barry Long, as for Eckhart Tolle (to quote a seminal aphorism from Long’s early promotional material), ‘Only Now Is Real’.
POSTSCRIPT
In spiritual circles, reference is sometimes made to the role and value of ‘right acknowledgment’. In this context, it is perhaps relevant finally to note the following statement from Barry Long’s From Here to Reality – The Final Essays, written in the months before his death in 2003. Although there is no reason to suspect that he had any particular individual in mind, he had this to say (referring to one of his own influences, an enlightened teacher he called ‘The Blessed John’, who taught him for a short period in the late 1960s):
‘Now and again spiritual thrusters with more zeal than realisation throw my teaching back at me in books and letters as their own inspiration, sometimes plagiarising whole phrases and sentences. Given the chance and inclination I endeavour to inform them of what the Blessed John once taught me, “Always be true to the source of your inspiration”. This, when you’re lifting stuff from a realised master, means clearly acknowledging that source.’
FOOTNOTE
References from Only Fear Dies are from the edition published in 1994. References from The Origins of Man and the Universe are from the revised edition published in 1998. References from The Power of Now are from the edition published in 2011.
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Barry Long - The End of the World (Audio Tape Transcript)
Speaker: Barry Long (Spiritual teacher) Title of audio tape: "Barry Long : End of the World (Prayer for Life)" Transcript done using automatic transcription tool (AI). Barry Long 's talk on a cassette tape called 'The End of the World'. The text was later published as 'The Way of Prayer' and included in a book, 'The Way In'. Barry Long had a series of audio cassettes available, one created in 1985 entitled, 'Barry Long: The End Of The World' . Barry Long -- The End of the World: A Prayer for Life Description of Barry Long's talk: An explanation of cause and effect in the psyche. Increasing uncertainty. Global unrest. Shocking events. What next? What's the fate of our world? If we pray for peace how will our prayers be answered? What can we do? This Barry Long audio book examines why our civilisation is being shaken, where humanity makes its mistakes – and predicts the outcome. Barry Long's radical message is a prayer for a new life on earth, beyond anything that can be imagined today. The end of the world, the actual annihilation of it, is the result of the world's unconscious praying. Here a spiritual master describes what right prayer is and explains the difference between the power of prayer and the force of prayer - a distinction humanity has never bothered to consider. These subjects are covered: The force of prayer - Unconscious and irresponsible praying - The consequences - No escape - The change you can make - The power of prayer - Life is good - How to pray rightly - A prayer for life - Prayers of freedom - World without hope - Responsibility - The world and the earth - Intelligence is the problem - Civilization is corruption - Real value - The purpose of tragedy - New life - Dismantling the world
_______________ Recorded in 1985 , by Barry Long
This is Barry Long speaking. Everything that I say in this tape is either true or false. There is no in between. But please don't believe me. Test each statement in your own experience. Only in that way can you ever know the truth. Much of what I am going to say will be new, unsettling, and disturbing. It will linger in you. To the extent that you are real, it will keep coming up in your awareness. It will cause a lot of self searching. In what follows, I am making a positive statement about life now and the future of life on earth. But in the present depressed condition of humanity, it is likely to be perceived initially as negative. Whether you agree or disagree with what is said is unimportant. The only question is, what are you going to do about it? And only you need to know the answer. I suggest you play the tape often. It will take a good while to absorb all the ideas. Each time you listen, you will discern new truths because the spiritual energy released will have been working in your subconscious from the last time, loosening and breaking up the old habitual hamstringing thought patterns. If you are serious in the search for what is
true, and who is not searching for it in some way or other, this tape will bring you closer to the wonder and beauty of life, the life within you, which is life on earth. We human beings have been praying since time began. Whatever we've been praying for doesn't seem to have done much good. Is the world as good as it is or as bad as it is because of our prayers? Either way is not much of a recommendation for prayer, is it? If our prayers ended the last global war forty years ago, whose prayers started it? And as we prayed for peace then, did we realize that our prayers would help to build the bomb and end the war in a flash by killing and maiming three hundred thousand people? Now we are praying for world peace again. I wonder what new calamities we're about to bring down upon the earth. Do you understand prayer? Do you know the difference between the force of prayer and the power of prayer? I don't think so. If you did, the earth and its people would not be in such an awful mess and be poised on the edge of the ultimate in disaster. If you allow it, I am going to present to you a way of prayer, a new way to pray, a way to save the earth and its people of the future. Whether you consider yourself an atheist or materialist is irrelevant. Terms like those are a way of entertaining yourself and have no real meaning. You are a human being. That means you pray. Everyone prays. You are praying at this moment only you don't realize it. It is that unawareness or ignorance that has brought humanity to the verge of annihilation. Prayer is the most effective misused and misunderstood force in the world. You are praying when you are ambitious or working towards an end, when you attempt anything or feel threatened. You pray every moment by hoping, hoping that your plans will work out, that what you are trying to do will succeed, that your next baby will be a boy or girl, that you won't get sick, that you'll be able to keep a date. And you pray every moment by expecting, Expecting that what you own will be there when you want it. That your lover still loves you. That death won't trouble you today. You pray when you are being greedy. When you have your eye on the only plate of prawns on the table or the last drink. When you are impatient, angry, or desiring sex, you are praying very intensely. To exist and survive in this world is an activity of constant prayer. Vibes, rays of vital force, radiate out from you into the world as continuous projections of hope. Hope that you will get through and not fail in existing or what you are doing. The more concentrated and intense you are at any moment, the stronger and more forcible are your vibes or personal prayer waves. Sometimes they reach the equivalence of violence. All this would be harmless if the prayer waves coming out of us were ineffectual as we all seem to imagine, but they are not. They are energetically substantive and accumulative. They have been building up since time began. And today in their global interaction, form the world's most destructive and diabolical invisible force. Since everyone seeks and prays continuously not to fail, and as prayer is the most effective force in the world, there should be no failure in the world. Failure occurs because success or gain can only come to you at someone else's expense. For you to be a successful poet, politician, or businessperson, which means that that is your constant prayer, some other poor poet, politician, or businessperson, has to fail or lose. There is only so much of everything in the world and that includes successful gain. The success of the world is represented at any moment by what each of its 4,000 people have gained. Only so many can be rich because only so many can be poor. The cake of the world, like the energy of the universe, is only so much. There is ample to go around if everyone had only what they needed. But since so many have prayed for and grabbed more than they need, it is no longer possible for the original losers to get back their share. Somebody like us has already got it. The haves like you and me who can afford the luxury of praying or vibing to be successful poets, politicians, or business people are merely playing or praying among ourselves with someone else's share or loss of cake while they toil or pray for the mere success of not starving. That's why success seems so abstract to us. It's lost the reality of an empty belly. However, we in turn are the poor to the rich of the world. The rich who are few in number but nevertheless have grabbed the most cake or booty do not struggle or pray to eat or to be successful poets, politicians, or business people. The rich pray only to be successful at wielding power by economic force, which is to keep the share out of the cake fixed forever as it is. The prayer of the rich is the mightiest prayer in the world. It holds the world together so that all the haves can
continue taking and having. So to succeed in anything, whether as an individual, an organization, or a nation, we have to take from some other person, some other organization, or some other nation somewhere, which doesn't say a great deal for the way of prayer or the way of life we've devised. Does it? Still, if our prayers work towards success, how does anyone actually lose? Because some of us are praying or vibing for the success of one thing, and others are praying for the success of its opposite. One cancels the other out or the strongest prayer eventually wins. But it can be quite a drawn out tussle for all but the rich as living shows. Also, some of us are actually vibing or praying for the failure of others or other things, and the success of praying for another's failure is, of course, for them to fail. Then there are the half hearted prayers which get overwhelmed by more intense prayers, and so on. But you'll notice that most of your regular vibing or praying, such as that involved in getting you to work each day, succeeds most of the time as long as it doesn't clash too much with what others want or are praying for. Prayer works and always towards success. Otherwise, you couldn't make any arrangements at all. You are able to pray pretty confidently by making plans to go on holiday on a certain date, and most times you make it. You can usually manage to keep advance appointments and to watch your favorite television program. You pray to keep your job and generally do. But if you get lax in your vibing or someone starts vibing against you, you might lose it. The whole world of circumstances is the meeting of these multiple billions of prayer waves or vital forces which humanity is giving out. Some harmonize and help each other. Some are incontinent and oppose each other, and some attract each other but are incontinent at the same time. So two cars collide, a company crashes, someone starves to death on the other side of the earth, or a pub full of people gets bombed. All is the blind force of unconscious irresponsible personal prayer at work, the uncertainty of living. Now we come to the other kind of prayer. The deliberate prayers of all those children, not to mention adults, praying every night and day the world over for someone or other to be blessed or especially favored, of you and I praying for a small miracle when we're in a tight spot, and of billions of others praying indiscriminately all around the earth to right the world's apparent ills. At this point, I have to ask you a question very seriously. Did you really think that all those innocent sounding prayers could be projected continuously into the world by generation after generation without setting in motion some sort of law of cause and effect? Did you perhaps even venture to assume that if nothing else, they were harmless? If such prayers are not effective, why does humanity pray and always has prayed? And if its prayers are effective, who said they're only effective of good? Have you ever thought about this? I ask you another very serious question. Do you really think you know what is wrong with the world? Sufficient to take it on yourself to pray to try to change it for what you think would be better. And do you trust the judgment of all those others, including the children, who also are praying because they think they know what's wrong or good? Would you pray so easily and sleep so untroubled if you knew that the effects of all your prayers and not just the effect you are praying for would come back on you? In a word, are you prepared to be answerable in your own life for all the changes involved in making the change you pray for? Because that is precisely what happens. All the prayers of the human race, the personal vibing and the deliberate praying for something knit up together. And remember, this has been going on since time began with the prayers or vibe waves contending with each other to work themselves out as circumstances in the world and continuing to do so ages after the generations who vibe them have been forgotten. The result is that a stupendous ferment of unexhausted prayers, a mighty field of force, has built up around the simplicity of the earth and its people. This is the world. And now the force of the world has reached flashpoint, disaster point. Not for just one nation this time as it did in 1945, but for all nations. You don't have to believe me. Keep checking with the daily news media and listen to the growing public protests of the worried people of the earth. All I'm doing is telling you the cause. The combined effects of all humanity's prayers descend continuously on humanity. Those effects are the condition of the world at any moment. The circumstances in which you and I and the rest of the Earth's people must endeavor to live our little lives. What the world is facing today with justified trepidation and a deepening sense of disaster which will turn to terror is a mighty moving mountain of undischarged responsibility for our
blind, selfish, and irresponsible praying. It is here. The force that went out of us and made the world what it is has returned to claim its source, and it's about to come down on us. There is no escape. It's heads down for all of us. In the time we've got, let's get it right or more right for the time after. What am I saying? I am saying that the world as we know it is finished. There is going to be an awful boycott. Just about all the Earth's population will be destroyed, but not quite all. The race will survive. The end can come any day. No day is safe anymore. The days at least used to be safe before our constant praying and vibing for favoritism and peace from war instead of justice for all produced the means of global destruction. Since then, the margin of time has been closing. Time, after all, is only the reducing distance between accountability for what you have received and what you have given. Now, apart from the daily period of waiting, time's up. All that can be done in the world has been done. Whatever is done now will be just another move in the step towards the end. Things can't get better except in the imagination and the daily media. All the peace movements, all the prime ministers, presidents, and armies, even the loftiest and most selfless external actions can't prevent what is coming to us. It's too late for persons and personal action. This way of prayer which I am going to present to you if you allow it is a way to help save the earth and its people of the future. At the same time, by helping you to understand prayer and the reality behind what is happening in the world, I am going to put you in touch with new powers within your being, powers deep in the subconscious that are now rising and ready to be released for good. The future life on earth has got to be saved from us, from repetition of the incurably selfish praying and vibing of you and me. Selfish means we can't help but project ourself into everything we do. We know of no alternative because we don't know what is good. What is good? I ask you now. We and our ingrained irresponsible threat to the future of the human race. If it were left to us, the new life on earth would be a carbon copy of living in the old world we love now, And the force would quickly build up again and destroy that world too. You and I have to start now, today, voluntarily eliminating our problematical self from within before circumstances do it from outside. The immediate task is to free this planet and its people as much as can be accomplished in the time we've got from the cumulative effects of our misguided praying and vibing to date, and to make sure that our prayers today don't bring down on them misfortunes tomorrow. You and I have to reverse the work of the force of prayer with the power of prayer. We have to bring life back to earth. You are the hope of the world. That's what it comes down to. Incredible, isn't it? Incredible that it should all finally depend or descend on you. Yet every one of us feels that we're somehow important, don't we? That our life must have some purpose beyond living and dying. Many of us have been inspired by the idea, for example, of Christ dying for the world. Dare you put yourself on the same level? Dare you not. Haven't you for most of your life felt that your views and opinion should be respected? That you were entitled to have a say or a hand no matter how small in determining your destiny by voting and decision making, or that at least you should be consulted or considered. Well, you were right. The final responsibility is yours. It is your world after all. Do you notice the impulse to run from this responsibility? Perhaps to argue that what I'm saying isn't true, to stop listening, to toss the tape away, to try to push the whole thing out of your mind, or perhaps to go merrily on your complacent way, imagining that it's okay, that someone or something will work it out and save the day. This is not a bad dream that you're going to wake up out of. It is reality. Please look at it. I'm not asking you to join a peace movement, to change your religion, to make any kind of protest or public announcement, to believe in anything or even to agree with me. I'm just asking you to take responsibility for being a human being on this earth. You think you are already taking this responsibility? What you have been taking responsibility for is the person that you are. The person you are is different to the human being you are which I am endeavoring to talk to. The person is what you and I project into the world and give a name to. Like my person is called Barry Long. The person you are is what performs and reacts in the world. The person, every person who ever lived, is what has brought us to this awful point.
As I have said, no overt action by any person or persons can change what is coming. That is the world's confrontation with its own reality, the truth of its own making. The only change that can be effective for good has to happen in you, the individual human being. In the time that is left, you have to change your person, transform it, metamorphose like the butterfly. You can do this only by making and continuing to make the personal sacrifice. That is to willingly surrender the person you are on behalf of the greater good, the human race. Only by your doing this through right prayer can the race make a fresh start on earth. Humanity of the future has to have new resources of spirit to draw on which only you, the individual, can provide. You have to be not a martyr in the physical sense, but a super person in the real sense, and you've got to do it alone. No one else is going to listen or hear, only you. And you can't leave it to fate because fate's against you. It's fate, nemesis itself, that's coming. You can't even leave it to god, Christ, Buddha, or any other divinity. God, Christ, or Buddha, the spirit of mankind, can and definitely will save you, the human being. There's no doubt about that. You are already saved because there is no death. But the spirit can't save the world of persons from its fate. What you, the person, pray for is what you get, and that is your fate. But in a world where every person is praying for something different, the result of fate is eventual disaster. God can't save this world from itself, but you can give the new earth a new kind of person. Will you? So what is good? As if we all didn't know. Life is good. Life on earth is good. Or it was good until the human race, by praying and vibing selfishly, created another sort of life living in the world. As the world spread over the earth, life as the good diminished, and living as the convenience got easier. Today, living is fairly easy with its scientific gadgetry and enlightened old cues. But life, the enriching inner revivifying good is that much harder to find. And any day now, as the world finally demonstrates its crowning achievement in gadgetry or living, there won't be much life around at all. The point is that light was good before the world began strangling it and still is good as we all experience beneath the strangulation we all feel. To get back to life, down to life, all we have to do is rid ourselves of the world. But as that can't be done now without destroying the world as the forceful pressure of living is about to do, the only alternative in the meantime is to rid the world of ourselves. This means getting rid of the rubbish, shedding the worldly person, and revealing the human being underneath. By learning to pray rightly, this can be done. And then as we pray rightly, we will start to vibe rightly and to come to life once more. To pray rightly, you must not pray for anything to happen or not to happen in the world. You must stop your children and yourself from asking for blessings for others. You must not pray by asking for the sick or troubled to be made well or untroubled. You must not ask to reverse the condition of anyone. You must not pray for anyone to receive. What the afflicted in this world need is more power, more life and love. Praying for people releases force. If such a prayer should help a person, which it often does because all prayer works towards success, you will have taken from someone else somewhere in the world whose condition then worsens. That might be yourself. For remember, your prayers come back on you. It is not uncommon for someone closest to a person who has been ill to become ill themselves after that person recovers or dies. Multiply this by a billion prayers a day, and you get the poverty, misery, and suffering that never leaves this world. Praying as you have been doing is transferring misfortune from one place to another. To pray rightly, you must hold the person's image or their energy within you. Resist the urge to pray for them to be saved. Holding the image, love them. Unite with their energy within you. Smile a little. Keep the corners of your mouth up. Don't think about the past, your sadness or loneliness. And don't cry. Stay with the energy. By resisting the urge to pray for them, by not using force which is the way of the world, power or life and love is released within you. And because you are holding the energy of the person, rightly containing your vibe or concern for them, the power will go to them. They will be comforted in some way even though their external circumstances may not appear to change, for all things must die as some things must fail. But you will have released the power of good into existence. The power of prayer, unlike the force of prayer, will not deprive another to heal or comfort the one you are concerned for. That power will go
wherever it is needed in the world without having any injurious negative effect. Power is all positive. Force is positive and negative. Thus, force creates the world of opposites, the world of pain and gain. Remember, if you pray for a particular person in the old way, you leave someone else out. You upset the balance of life. You create the condition of injustice in living that requires someone to lose for another to gain. You make the world stronger and contribute to the unhappiness of life on Earth. It must be everyone who is blessed, not someone whom you think should be. And don't try to pray for everyone. You and I are not large enough, just enough, wise enough, loving enough, humble enough, or selfless enough to pray for the earth and all its people. If you would take responsibility for such a prayer, you would have to be life itself, the power itself, and there would be no need for the prayer or the prayer. Do you see this With our self projecting, self selecting prayers, we wrap the goodness of the earth and those who come and go on it in a short sighted, unjust world. Nevertheless, you must pray. But pray as often as you can without an image in your mind. Pray for yourself. Pray to be one with life, one with the good, one with the earth or God if you like, one with the source. Feel the life within you. Don't think about it. Feel it. You're alive, aren't you? So life must be there. Find it. Feel it. Be it. Give yourself to it. Sink into it. Don't give yourself to the world. Give yourself to the good, the life within you. Then you will find you are truly serving people in the world. You will know you are coming alive. The power will work in you and through you. Pray like this. I love. I love life. I love being alive. Because I love life, I love many things or some things. But there are things I do not love and do not even think of. As all things are in life, and that life is in me now, I pray that I may love life more, feel it more within me, and in this way reach all things that may need more life and love. I pray to be one with life and love. Teach your children to pray with their being and not with their thoughts. Pray at all times. Pray in the bus or the train or while you are walking. Pray while you are making love. Allow the life, the wonder to swell in you. Smile a little. Don't be concentrated. Be open. Be loving. Be empty. Be giving. Pour out your being without thought or intention as the bird pours out its being in song.
To free the world or anything of yourself is to help to heal it. The error of the world is in you and me. Free the world of your error, and you free it of yourself. Free it of yourself, and you create a little bit of space for love and rightness to surface in the world and work for good. Love and rightness are there ready to work on any condition of sickness, poverty, or misery once you and I create the space for it in our own being by getting ourself out of the way. Pray for the starving and suffering of the world like this. I free you of my anger, my greed, my thoughtlessness, and my thoughtfulness in wanting to change things for you without giving my life to you or for you. I free you of my opinions about what caused your condition, of my interest in reading about and viewing your misery, seeing your emaciated bodies, and hearing of your suffering while my own belly was full. I free you of my ignorance and thinking that I was really sorry for you or that I had helped you by sending money or food. For that money or food which I didn't need must have come from someone else, yourself perhaps, or from those who must starve tomorrow. How did I come to have so much when you have none? You had it once. You weren't always hungry. Who took it from you and gave it to me? All those prayers of the privileged and this privileged nation certainly worked against you, didn't they? Made us rich and you hungry. Your prayers must have been too simple, too natural. But now it looks as though we've been too smart and prayed ourselves into a far greater impoverishment than yours. Now I know that I must help to end the condition causing your poverty and hunger, and not just the appearance of it by giving up myself, my selfish prayers, and this foolish thoughtless thinking person who thought that misery was natural on the earth. The people you feed with belly food today will be hungry again tomorrow. Or if they're not, someone else will be. They are all people suffering from the same disease, the same condition of the world, the lack of life and love in you and me. Pray to free the world of your personal self. Pray like this. I free the world of my prayers. I pray for nothing in the world. I want nothing from the world except what I am given and what I earn. I have no quarrel with the world. I know it is cruel, violent, and difficult, and that in that it is at least honest, for I know where I stand and will not be surprised by what it does to me. Me. I live in the world. I work and perform in the world, but I do not love the world. I love life and the earth, and in that I am immortal. I free the world from my concept of what is good and what should be changed. I free you, everyone and everything, from any emotional demand I have put on you. I let the emotion in me go knowing that love never leaves, that finally all persons and things depart, but never my love. I hold onto nothing that anyone has said or done in the past. I free you from inside where I have been holding you a prisoner in my own dim, fearing world. If you come back and try to make me hold on to you with my resentment, envy, or wanting, I pray that I might have the strength of life to let you go again with love. For the strength of life is its power not to hold, but to keep giving of itself. What have I got to give? Only what I would hold. The power is with you if you give up the force. I know that many people will be dismayed by what I have said about the world being destroyed. That is unavoidable. But I want to help you to see and understand what is going on, for it is because you have not faced up, not understood the world and confused it with the earth that you are now frightened or apprehensive. I didn't invent the peril. You don't get dismayed or frightened by fiction. It's the authenticity of the situation presented without any fantasy of escape that is dawning on you, penetrating you. As a spiritual teacher, it is my responsibility to reveal the truth to you. I have told you the truth of the world and what is going to happen in your lifetime. When you look closely at what I am saying, you will see it is not so different to what the more reflective people of the earth have been saying for some years now. If you don't desist, you're going to blow us all up. Well, we haven't persisted, and I'm telling you it's now too late for the if, the hope. We live on hope in this world. We have to to live in it, and I have removed the hope. Was there any hope before I spoke? Of course not. There's no hope in this world because you are going to die. Like the world, you can die any day. But you have kept yourself from going mad from this thought by living in hope in the fantasy that you'll die in some
distant tomorrow. The fact that the world is now about to die too is really incidental. It terrifies you because it means you've run out of tomorrows, run out of world to escape into. How can you go on in the world if it is going to end? You go on exactly as you are. Nothing's changed. How did you go on each day before when you knew you were going to die? Only now you are wiser. Live the prayer. Transform your vibes by being more loving and understanding. By being more patient and aware. Die daily for the power. Rather than go out, go in. If you must, go out. But don't be confused. Don't try to do both at once. Help others who are receptive and your children to understand the difference between life and the world, between power and force. Play them this tape. Don't try to exclude the world from your life for that will only create resistance and add more pressure. You live in this world. You help to make it. You just can't disown it or get out of it. But don't add to it either by trying to change it. Change yourself. Do what you must in the world. Give it its due no more, and don't be deceived by it. See yourself as responsible for life and the earth every moment, not only when you feel like it or have the time. Don't hurt either any more than you have to. Yet don't feel guilty for what you may have done. Make a fresh start now. The earth forgives our transgressions. Be of good cheer. Life is now. Life goes on. If you still feel dismayed, please listen to what else I have to say. I am not going to give you hope, but I am going to give you more of the truth which is the strength of life. I have said that the world is going to be destroyed, not the earth. That is very important to remember because it is the earth, not the world, that you love. The earth will be here, and if you come to life in the time you've got, you'll be here too. However, the earth and the life forms on it will receive a savage punishing blow. The earth too has to pay a penalty as it's already doing for for the selfishness of the intelligent life us that came out of it. We humans are of the earth. We are the life form of intelligence on earth, and out of us came the human intelligence that created the world. The earth is responsible for us as a mother is responsible for her child. If the child is irresponsible or unloving, the mother will suffer in some way. Our tremendous freewheeling intelligence is the problem. We are very clever, very smart children. But right from the beginning, we have been takers. With our unfeeling intelligence and selfish greed, we took from the mother without consideration until a third of her was reduced to desert for which we cleverly blame the elements. And at the same time, we took from each other until half of us were starving or impoverished, for which we again cleverly blamed everything but ourselves. Without let up, the mother and the life on the earth continue to be denuded and deprived by our rapacious intelligence. At every level of existence, our intelligence demonstrates exploitation and greed under the excuse and euphemism of progress. Progress is essential, says intelligence. Is it? Or is it only essential when you're running from something? The trouble is we got it wrong to start with. Our intelligence should have been the servant. That is, it should have served some real value. But the human race has had no real values, nothing of worth that ever lasted. And with nothing to serve but its shifting self interest, the smart servant became the clever master. Today, we still serve nothing of value, only progress and convenience. What do you serve? Give your life to that is not of your own. What does the world devote itself to? We simply don't know what to do with our intelligence. We're stuck. We're going towards self destruction and we can't stop. Can you believe it? You've got to believe it. Keep reading the newspapers. It's actually happening. All we can do is fight and oppose, be for or against, vote this way or that, and hope for a final compromise. That's all our intelligence knows. Will you try this different way? Put intelligence second. Will you give life itself a chance? Is there anything intelligence has created that is worth saving in this world? Would you
make a mental list, please? If you think certain persons are worth saving, then why does everybody die? And many of them very young too. Life on earth, which is still the master of death, doesn't rate persons valuable at all like our intelligence tries to. Life is indeed valuable. That's why it's always here. But persons come and go like you and I will. Art. Our intelligence has murdered art. The art we think is art is a last pitiful remnant of the great art that once was life on earth itself, the art of being a human being before the intelligent person took over. Why do so few of the earth's population value what we call art even among those in our own intelligent society? Why is there so much room in it for posturing and humbug? Because it is not art. It's just all we've got left. All we can muster at the end of an inglorious intelligent era. A few paintings, statues, texts, buildings are all we've got to show for five thousand years of intelligent civilization. Five thousand years of creeping westernization. What's the difference between an art gallery and a museum? The price of what's in it. Intelligence long ago priced art out of existence. And what will we leave of our art today? Our dancing, music, filmmaking, paintings, sculptures, words, are they memorable? Are they alive, or do they just manage to eke out a temporary living through the few who try so hard to give them life? Are they truly worth preserving as the creative spirit itself? Or have we with our intelligence debased the creative living spirit that was man, ourselves, the great art on earth, and replaced it with an intelligible thing which is no more of the living spirit, the human being that is in all of us, than its fruitless off spring, the sterile spaceship, computer, and nuclear reactor. Perhaps you think our ideas are worth saving such as the ideas that develop the means of creating electricity, space travel, and our high-tech, high con society. That's because you can't see life beyond progress, beyond the bomb. All our ideas, because of the absence of any value to serve with them, go in one direction. Away from life which is the earth, towards death, the bomb, or its partner, the cultured germ. You can't get rid of the bomb or its cultured partner no matter how hard you try Because our technology progress is going to invent a better one, a simpler one, an easier one, a do it yourself more instant one. Keep reading the newspapers. It will be announced before long. It can't be avoided. That's the way we think. That's the way of progress. We develop wonderful ideas hoping to improve the world, and invariably, they contribute to greater competition, rivalry, political opportunism, fear and exploitation, whether it is of space, nature, or its people because we don't know what to serve. Our intelligence is out of control. The rich have won. The share out stays fixed. The world will never change. But in winning and having at the expense of others, we have lost it all. Man, as the conscious surviving part of future life on earth, will retain his creative genius, but it will be controlled by the creative spirit within him. He will no longer have anything to do with progress. He will have discovered a real value to serve, the value of life. And his ideas will work for life for good, not for death or gain. Anything worth preserving is of the earth and not of our civilization. Our achievements are completely expendable as were the achievements of all previous civilizations. The earth and life on it is the only thing of any consequence that has survived any of them. And as I have already said, the earth and life on it is all that will survive of this civilization. Your dismay and attempt to disbelieve what I am saying is because you happen to be at the end of this civilization. Life is the same at the end of every civilization. And, of course, it's almost impossible for you as it was for all the others at the end of their civilizations, to imagine that your world is finished. Would you please look at this? See whether it's true. For I can only point out the truth. You have to perceive it for yourself. All previous civilizations were corrupt like ours, a futile attempt by man to create a world of his own on the already perfect earth, and all eventually destroyed themselves or unsuspectingly allowed themselves to be destroyed through what they considered to be their finest achievement. In our case, this, the means of destruction, will be our scientific genius, our intellectual materialism. Please look closely at what I'm saying. Please don't believe me. Nothing of any previous civilization do we consider to be of sufficient value to retain as our way of life. Because nothing in those civilizations, like nothing in ours, was of any real value. Bits and pieces which we keep around are not a way of life.
What is of real value once you find it? You live. You don't shut it up in a museum or a book, and you don't study it. You just live it. You don't have to learn it. There are no scholars, professionals, or professors of life or love, which is the true value of life on earth. All scholars and practicing students are of the world, and they study the world. All scholars and students are as dead, that is, as lacking in life and love, as the things they study. Life is not something that can be studied. You can't study life on earth. You are life on earth. You can only love it and be it. All you can study are life forms or formulas, and they are not life. In precisely the same way as the scholars and professionals, the world's workers and its wealthy players who have lost touch with the powers within are as dead as the world they toil in and play in. Everything worth preserving is in man and the other species, and both will continue after the end of the world. But man is to undergo an enormous change in consciousness as a result of the catastrophic tragedy he will witness and be totally involved in. The experience will disintegrate all the old patterns of his mind, incendurize and purge the human psyche to its foundations, and transform self consciousness on earth. No class of people will be left out of it. No politicians, industrialists, royalty, financiers, generals, scientists, or workers to imagine and discuss the carnage from protected positions. Every individual will be the battlefield of personal soul raking tragedy. Why? Why in the purpose of things is such horrific devastation and suffering necessary? Because only personal tragedy changes man. Of all the tragedy that has been in the world, it has never affected the majority before. Consequently, man who lives off the imagined security of the majority, the world, has changed very little. This time, however, engulfed in total tragedy of his own making, which leaves no escape, no room for discussion or fantasy, he will change. It will literally blow the world out of him. From our worldly point of view, he will know appalling personal suffering for a long time, but he will not see it that way. He will not recover and embrace the world again as we do now when tragedy strikes here and there. He will never be that man again. He will be a creature of higher consciousness. As the world within and without vanishes, he will come in contact with the powers within, the identical powers that I am endeavoring to reveal in you now. Helped and directed by these powers within him, he will be intelligent and responsible since he will at last have discovered something of enduring value, life on earth. Self will have been obliterated from his self consciousness. The powers guiding him from within will be intensely real and discernible because they will no longer have to come through the deadening barrier of the world within him. The survivors will retain practically no memory of the past. They will not long for what has been. They will have an enlightened aversion to the past. They will know that it was the past, that which we defended as our way of life and allowed to happen, that decimated the earth and the life on it. They will have no sympathy at all for the likes of us, no affection for us. They will regard us as the unforgivable barbarians who wantonly and willfully deflowered the earth. Any person like us who should appear among them will have the world summarily obliterated from them in a way similar to what was done to the earth and the survivors. All that is worth preserving will be present in the men and women who survive. They will not draw on the memory of the past for anything. And unlike us, they will have nothing to learn, nothing to study and distract them which would allow another world like ours to build up again. They will have learned the only lesson to be learned from living which we never learned. That to lose contact with the power within by trying to create another world with human intelligence is inevitable disaster. As I say, all that is worth preserving will be present in the individual survivors. They will love, serve, and know life in a way that man and woman have longed for but have not been able to do for twelve thousand years. They will be in continuous intimate contact with the life within them as living spirit and with the earth and life around them as one living organism. The world within them and around them will have vanished. It is impossible for your mind to imagine what the new life on earth without the world is to be. All our imaginings are of the world, of our self consciousness, and are not true. But simply by listening to what I am saying and not employing your worldly faculty of thinking back and reasoning, you will hear the truth and feel a subtle excitation in your being. It is the world within you alone that prevents you from hearing the truth and being yourself.
Do you know why everything in the world has to be learned? Why you have to study and practice to sing, paint, dance, write, make music, be a doctor, carpenter, teacher, or any other form of self expression. It is because learning and practicing, the great effort and years required to master anything, including school subjects, are the action action of breaking through the awful crust of the world that encases each one of us. Learning and practicing, which are the act of surrendering great slices of our beautiful life on earth to the world, are the only means we have left of penetrating to our natural self underneath which does everything so easily and naturally because it doesn't have to learn. Look at it, please. Have you noticed how easy, joyful, and fulfilling it is expressing yourself after you've gone through the sweat and tears of learning? That is after you've sacrificed enough of your precious life to the monster of the world. Every day, look closely and you will perceive it. The world requires man to make a greater sacrifice of his time or life. To be successful, the young are now forced to go to school or study until they are in their mid twenties, thirties, even forties, or they just give up. But you can't just give up or drop out. The world won't let you. This is everybody's rat race. You've got to make the required sacrifice to the monster in one way or another. If not in time, then in pain, boredom, or tears. Have you noticed how many children and teenagers don't know what occupation they want to follow? What they want to do with their lives? That's the world in them. Its deadening weight prevents them from being able to feel their true selves, their natural bent for self expression. Each individual is born with a natural ability to contribute something uniquely worthwhile to the earth and the life on it. If only it can be reached through the acquired and contrived learning of the world. Did you think learning and studying were a natural process? They are the most unnatural things on earth. That is why even when we love a subject, we all find the learning bit so tedious. How much of your life have you had to spend learning? Aren't you still learning now? Struggling to break through the world in some way or other. It is due to that exhausting effort that you seldom feel really alive and long to be your natural self. We don't get much time for enjoying life on earth anymore because the world compels us to waste most of it learning. But even if we give the world our entire life, which most people are doing today, it still doesn't deliver the goods. The world always short changes you. To learn to be a successful dancer, painter, actor, computer programmer, financier, or anything else means that after all those years of effort, you've only broken through to yourself in that one tiny area. The rest of your existence in this world remains as hard as anyone else's. Even the world's most successful and powerful people worry, feel cornered, misunderstood, and get depressed. No one who has learned to be anything in this world is happy for long. Learning is completely unnecessary, but only after the world has been removed from the person. While the world is there, and it is in everyone on earth, you have to go on learning and sacrificing your life for it. What is the world in you? The world is what you have learned. Take love. Everyone on earth today has learned how to love. The result is that when the time comes for them to really love, they have to unlearn what the world has taught them, and that is the pain. The dying to the world you feel when your lover fails you or your heart is broken. Amazing, isn't it? And you thought it was all natural, didn't you? I am doing something similar to you now. For the last hour or so, I have been helping you to unlearn. I have been dismantling what the world has taught you by exposing what is unnatural and untrue in it and in your life. And that again is disturbing and painful, isn't it, as you reach through the pieces towards yourself? I am here to help you overcome the world. The pain you can handle. The world you can't. Goodbye for now.